The challenge of a new naturalism

Contemporary naturalism is changing, and scientific reductionism is under challenge from those who advocate a more comprehensive outlook, in effect, an expanded naturalism that is no longer the naturalism of the seventeenth century, a naturalism that much contemporary political and social thought still takes for granted. This volume, arising from the first Telos Australia Symposium, held at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, in 2014, introduces some of the key questions in the current debates. It also poses the question of whether more satisfactory political and social thought could be produced if scientific reductionism were replaced by a richer and more hermeneutical naturalism, one that takes more account of philosophical anthropology and philosophical biology, the co-involvements of human beings and their environments, and the potential of more naturalistically grounded approaches to culture.